


Not Thrown Away- Supernatural Deserved Better 31 Day Challenge

by oncethrown



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Multi, SPNDBCC, Supernatural Deserved Better
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:20:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27824401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oncethrown/pseuds/oncethrown
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7
Collections: SPN Deserved Better





	Not Thrown Away- Supernatural Deserved Better 31 Day Challenge

Imagine boy who loses his family at 4 years old. 

His mother dies in a fire and grief drives his father to be a different man, not a father so much as a commander. His baby brother, who he carried from the fire in his tiny arms even as his mother roasted on the ceiling, is left in his clumsy care as he spends his life moving from motel to motel and school to school. 

He never has a relationship, and the couple attempts he makes don’t pan out. He’s too wild. Too unusual. Too dangerous. But it doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t matter that it’s not true, because he’ll always be out of their lives in a couple weeks. A month at the outside. 

And then, the little brother he raised, fed, cared for, had to be mother and father to- leaves. Just when they were getting old enough to be peers. Leaves their father and their lifestyle more than he leaves Dean, but it doesn’t feel like it. 

And then Dean’s father starts to leave him behind more and more. Splitting up in Montana for a couple weeks. Berating him for missing an easy kill when they go after werewolves together in Oregon and then taking off to deal with a lead on a demon. 

He joins forces with other hunters now and then. People who crash his case without a disguise as good or as useful as his. Idiots who only think they know what their doing. Lee Webb, for a while. A friend... or something. But it can’t last. 

And then, finally, his father goes on a hunting trip, and he doesn’t hear from him for days, and Dean is so alone, he breaks his promise to himself that he would let Sam go on and live a normal life. And he brings Sam’s life crashing down around him, and goddamn it, he’s a little relieved when it gets Sam back in the car. Back on the road. 

They hunt. They hunt for years. and they find themselves at the center of the battle between heaven and hell. They lose their father. They gain an angel. 

Their work is dangerous. Their enemies are powerful and merciless, and there is a version of this story where every new friend, ally and supporter dies. Where Sam and Dean only ever have each other to fall back on. Where they push too hard and sacrifice too much and have to watch the people around them die over and over. 

But. 

There are more things in heaven an earth than they have dreamt of. 

They learn that there are people who have been hunters for generations, and not just hunters who were born in fire and tragedy like they were. They find a roadhouse full of people who know the truth. Who work as hard as they do. They aren’t in Nebraska all that often, but it’s a safe place to have a drink and bunk down when they are there. They reconnect with Bobby Singer, who becomes more of a father to them than John ever was, though it’s still hard for Dean to admit it. 

Castiel, the angel who Dean hated least, becomes a friend. More than a friend, Almost a brother, Dean thinks. Someone... someone he can love differently than he loves Sam. Someone he, as an adult, as his own person, can choose to care about and take care of. 

And there are still worlds left to conquer. Every year there seems to be a bigger threat, more of the world in danger, but every year they have more people to rely on.

To love. 

They check in with Jo Harvelle when they are in the Northeast now. She’s mostly going to college, but still hunts here and there. 

Gordon... they work with Gordon when they have to. He’s dangerous... but you don’t bring a knife to a gun fight and hunters are not, by and large, cuddly. Gordon is at least more reliable than Bella, who is about as likely to help you as she is to double cross you, and every couple years they always need her too much to say no when she calls. 

Jody Mills calls when she knows she needs back up, and Dean and Sam don’t talk about how nice it is to be put up in her guest room and welcomed to her leftovers when they are there. 

The nerdy redhead surprises Dean. Charlie, who worms her way into his heart so fast. 

He thinks about her, sometimes, even in Purgatory, as he and Benny hunt for Castiel, and Benny stops asking who this angel is to Dean that makes him so important. 

When Dean escapes purgatory, but loses Cas, and doesn’t know what to say to Benny, he tries to find her, but lets go when he realizes that she might be the one person he can’t find if they don't want to be found. 

Years go by, and it turns out Hunters aren't the only monster hunters. Some hoighty-toighty bunker douche bags tried their hand at it too, and Dean finds himself, suddenly, with a home. 

It’s a creepy underground 50′s bunker... but it’s big. It’s even big as it starts to fill up. 

Castiel takes the room next to Dean’s. Sam doesn’t say anything when he picks a different wing of the barracks. 

When Jo drops out of college again, she comes to stay for a while. 

An encounter with spell work and fairies at a Larp Weekend bring Charlie back into the fold, and she grabs another one of the rooms in Sam’s wing. Claire Novak runs away to them more than once. 

It’s not as though it’s ever bustling, but it’s not as though it’s quiet. Jack, a child in a teenager’s body and a nearly all powerful being in a tee shirt, certainly keeps things interesting, but even he isn’t the strangest piece of their little compound when Gabriel comes back to life and Rowena, mother of the king of hell have... one bedroom, at least until they swindle, and possibly murder their way into a penthouse someone far away from the midwest. Charlie, after an extremely strange night, starts dating Dorothy from the wizard of Oz, and Sam’s side of the barracks fills up just a little more. 

And then, here and there... a monster. 

When Garth becomes a werewolf, he doesn’t know where else to stay. When Sam’s kitsune friend from junior high is being hunted, they hide in the bunker. They don’t stay forever, but they retreat there. To Sam and Dean. And Castiel. And Charlie. And whoever else might be a spare bedroom at that point. 

Dean doesn’t notice how much he’s changing until Amara brings back his mother. 

And suddenly he feels like he has to hide how he talks to and touches Castiel when she’s in the same room. And Charlie wants to talk to him about it, and he doesn’t know how. 

He finds himself telling Mary about John, and realizing that when he talks about his life with John... there is nothing else in it. 

Motels and monsters.

No learning to make old fashioned to get Cas to try whiskey. No sitting with Charlie at the computer for hours while she patiently explains something that she could do in her sleep. No Rowena smuggling cursed bones into the library when she promised she would stop. No trying to explain Scooby do to Cas, or reading a book that Cas leant him on their very infrequent days off. 

And then Sam meets a girl on a hunt. Eileen. And Dean can see how he lights up around her, and the way she smiles at him, and the way people look at Sam and Eileen, and then at him and Castiel, and then anywhere else. 

But it’s not the focus of their lives as they have to defeat the men of letters. 

and then another dimension opens up, and all of them are confronted with who they could have been. Hard, ransacked versions of themselves. 

Dean’s relieved he doesn’t exist in that dimension. He’s starting to think he knows what the version of himself would look like. He thinks it’s probably the version of himself who sold his soul for Sam. 

A man he no longer is. 

Eventually they win. 

Or almost win, because now, after everything, they have to fight god. But they do go home. They call everyone, and everyone starts driving to Kansas. 

But Dean goes to Charlie’s room, and he’s ready to talk about it, and she’s happy to hear about it. 

And then, even though it’s late, he goes to Cas’s room and he says something he’s barely been letting himself think. 

He stays there with Cas. All night. 

In the morning, they walk into the kitchen together, where Sam and Eileen are rather conspicuously drinking Bloody Mary’s very slowly, and Charlie and Dorothy are playing footsy under the table and going through some research with Pamela. Bobby is bent over a book and chugging coffee. So is Mary. Jack is eating some kind of sugary cereal the way a cat eats a bread bag tie, hunched over it like he’s worried someone’s going to take it away from him when they realize he isn’t supposed to have it. 

Dean sees Cas smile out over the room, and the way that all of them smile back. And he takes Cas’s hand. 

It takes time and work and struggle. But they do defeat God. They do win their freedom and their lives back. 

All of them. 


End file.
